ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blogger stacks an early beta build of Windows 7 against 32-bit Vista (and an SP1 upgrade) on the same hardware. In three out of four tests, even a non-optimized Windows 7 trumps Vista.

As Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out, it's just one system's benchmarks on test that, for the most part, throw a range of apps at a system and see how they fare. But given that Windows 7 will likely be optimized a bit for final release, it's promising to see it beat Vista's speeds in all but one rendering-related test—and even that one was close. [via]